Have you ever tried to round up a dozen cats into the tub for a bath? I haven’t personally (although there is probably a YouTube video), but I can imagine that the task is similar to managing remote employees. Did everyone show up? Are they where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be? How can you be sure? After all, they are remote. Are their hours correct? Today we want to help calm the chaos and suggest a few things you should never do if you manage remote employees.

Never rely on handwritten employee time sheets. Unless you hate profits and want to waste money. Instead switch to an online employee time clock and save up to 6% (and probably more) on payroll. The savings is the difference between the hours your remote employees write down, compared to the accurate time our clock in, clock out system captures. Then consider your time saved processing payroll, when all employee hours are in one simple online report.

Never expect what you don’t inspect. The belief is that people will live up to the level of expectations you have of them. People more often live up to the level of what you inspect rather than what you expect. We’ve talked about this before. Even if you use our employee call in system and get alerts each time your remote employees clock in, even if our Random Voice Verification (RVV) helps prevent buddy-punching, even though we GPS track and report that your employees are at the job site or not, you still need to do random, surprise drop-ins on the job site. Drill and instill the expectation into your remote employees that you will check on them occasionally without notice. One customer does this and found that although his 2 man crew clocked in, only one man was on the job site. Our RVV feature tipped him off that there could be a problem.

Never wait until payroll day to review employee hours. By then overtime has already happened. Or your employee spent 30 minutes on a job that you know takes 2 hours to do right-and that was 5 days ago. It’s too late now to correct the situation. You need current, easy to access information. If you use handwritten timesheets (see #1) collected weekly, at least have your remote employees report their daily hours by text or email. Then input and tally those numbers in a spreadsheet, in a notebook or a napkin…somewhere! The best solution is our automated clock in, clock out system that reports hours live. You can easily track throughout the week the total weekly hours for every employee on the Workforce Dashboard.

As a small business owner with remote employees you face many challenges. We hope to help with this short list of things that you should never do. A longer list probably exists with the things that you should do, but at the top of that list is to sign up for a free 30 day trial on our online timekeeping system. It’s up to you if you want to give your cat a bath.